Another backsliding month for me. Despite going 24-16 I never made it past rank 17 (one 5-game losing streak really hurt) and now I've slid down to 21. The amount of grind needed to move back up is somewhat daunting. At five stars per rank, I need 100 stars to get back to 15. My win rate at these ranks is significantly better than the 53-54% I usually get so it's not going to be a complete slog but even with bonuses I think my net progress is not likely to exceed .5 stars per game. Do I think I'm going to play 200 games of Hearthstone at 10 minutes per game? Hell, no. Never mind the launch of BfA, it's just too boring to spend 33+ hours on this, especially since if I really want to climb I'm going to have to restrict myself to 1-2 deck choices.

On the one hand it's sort of frustrating because I think I am about a rank 13-15 player; that's where I ended up at the end of most months previously. I'm annoyed that one bad month cost me this much. On the other hand, the season reward differences between 13 and 17 aren't all that much.

I got tired of losing to people who just had the right legendary. Most of my games felt like I was just about to win and then they would play the "I win" card and I would lose. Once the new expansion lands, I'll likely poke my nose in for a little bit. I've started playing "duelyst" which is a TCG combined with a TBS. I haven't really played it enough to know if it suffers from some of the same problems, but the starting user experience isn't bad. I'm winning pvp with a starter deck and the decks I'm currently facing seem varied, which is nice.

My win rate at these ranks is significantly better than the 53-54% I usually get so it's not going to be a complete slog but even with bonuses I think my net progress is not likely to exceed .5 stars per game.

I just finished my 50th game and due to a streak got my 5th rank 17 star. Conveniently that's now 20 stars for the month. My record to this point is 31-19, which is a pretty astonishing 62%. I doubt I can sustain that.

More crucially I see I vastly overestimated my progress rate. Even with this win rate my return is 0.4 stars per game. If I can somehow get 6 more stars to 15 the calculus will change because of the not losing stars, but I'm not sure I can do that in the few days I have left.

As I thought, I didn't make 15. I ended the month 37-26, a couple stars into 16, about a 59% win rate. Good, but not that much above my usual 53-54%.

Today I got the reset and I'm two stars into 20. Those two stars represent my net progress for 63 games. I doubt I'll play that many games in a month again for a very long time - there's just too much else I want to do with my life. The grind isn't worth it. I'd play Arena except I'm hoarding my gold to buy packs for the upcoming expansion.

The upcoming expansion (Boomsday Project) is coming with single-player content two weeks after the expansion release. This time it's not a dungeon run format, but "Puzzle Lab". If I understand it right, there are 120 challenges, each of which gives you a fixed game position and has you play one turn with the goal of (depending on the challenge) winning, creating a mirrored board state, clearing the board, or surviving the next turn.